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Hey, fruit flies, your baby boom ends here. Save the everyday with Amazon. This is Optimal Living Daily episode 810, The Meaning of Life, Part 2, by Derek Sivers of Sivers.org. And I'm Justin Malek, your narrator, where I find the best blogs in the world related to personal development, productivity, and minimalism, mostly.
And I get permission from the authors and simply narrate them for you. Really quick, it's the last day of the month. That means we're doing a book giveaway tomorrow to a random person on our weekly newsletter. So if you're not part of that yet, now's a great time to join.
Join before midnight to be entered. You can do that at oldpodcast.com. And today's narration is part two of three, a transcript of a performance, actually. If you're new here, I'd recommend listening to yesterday's episode first.
But if you're all caught up, let's get to it and continue optimizing your life. The Meaning of Life, Part 2, by Derek Sivers of Sivers.org. Life is choice. Some say life is choice.
Life is all about choice. You make a hundred little choices a day and a hundred big choices in your life. These choices change your entire life. Your life is created by your choices.
Therefore, life is choice. So if life is choice, the way to have a good life is to make good choices. How can you make good choices? Four ways.
Number one, let instinct trump logic. The different parts of your brain started developing at different periods in evolution. The oldest part of your brain, the one that's been evolving since we were fish, deals with instincts, fears, and gut feelings. The newest part of your brain, the one that's pretty uniquely human, deals with logic, language, and predictions.
This newest part is still in beta. A $5 calculator can beat it at math, but this oldest part was launched a billion years ago and has been in production and development ever since. Everything you observe and learn is first processed by your logical brain, but then the results are permanently stored as instincts, fears, and gut feelings. Your instincts and emotions hold the culmination of everything you've ever observed and learned.
So you'll make better choices if you listen to your instincts instead of relying too much on your $5 calculator beta brain. How can you make good choices? Number two, stop at good enough. You now have more options than ever.
You try to choose the best option, the best career, the best school, and the best boyfriend or girlfriend, or partner or spouse. But thinking this way makes you feel worse about the choices you've made. You're more aware than ever of all the options you didn't choose and the benefits of each. So don't seek the absolute best.
Stop when you find an option that is good enough. You'll make an equally good choice, but more importantly, you'll feel much better about it. Happiness counts. How can you make good choices?
Number three, set limits. Every choice you have to make causes a little bit of pain. Having choice in life is good, but having more choice is not always better. You're happier when you let other people make some choices for you.
If you're very sick, you want your doctor to choose what's best, not say, there are dozens of good options, what do you want to do? This is the appeal of religion. It gives you rules. It makes many of the choices for you.
So set limits to your choices in life. Cut off some options. Give yourself rules. How can you make good choices?
Number four, choose important, not urgent. You know the difference between what's long-term important versus short-term urgent. What's urgent are emails, texts, tweets, calls, and news. What's important is spending a thousand hours to learn a new skill that will really help you in your life or work.
What's important is giving your full undistracted attention to the important people in your life. What's important is taking time to get exercise or to collect and share what you've learned. But none of these things will ever be urgent. So you have to ignore the tempting cries of the urgent and deliberately choose what you know is important.
So life is choice. What do you think? Pretty good argument? Let's try another.
Life is memory. Some say life is memory. The future doesn't exist. It's something we imagine.
The present is gone in a millisecond. So everything we experience in life is a memory. You could live a long life, but without a lot of memories, you only experienced a short life. If you don't remember your life, it's like it never happened.
So life is memory. So if life is memory, the way to have a good life is to make more memories. How can you make more memories? Change routines.
Break monotony. Move. Make a major change whenever you can. These are your chronological landmarks.
These are the hooks where you'll hang your memories. Document it. Blog it. Not a company's walled garden, but in a format you can archive and look through in 50 years or your grandkids can look through in 100 years.
Keep a private blog for your future self and tell the tales of where you've been, what you did, and the quirky people you've met along the way. You'll be surprised how much you forget if you don't record it. Socrates said the unexamined life is not worth living. What about the forgotten life?
So life is memory. What do you think? Want to do another? Life is learning.
Both my smart friends and my spiritual friends insist that the meaning of life is learning, that the reason you're here is to learn. Not just for your own sake, but for everyone alive and future generations. The meaning of your life is to learn. So if life is learning, the way to have a good life is to learn a lot.
How can you learn a lot? Instead of talking about learning techniques, let's talk about getting the right mindset so you can learn more than you realize. You've probably heard about the fixed mindset and the growth mindset. The fixed mindset says, I am good at this, or I am bad at this.
This starts in childhood when your parents say, you're so good at math, you think, I'm good at math. But then when you do poorly on one test, you think, they were wrong, I'm not good at math. Most people think this way. You can hear it when they say she's a great singer or I'm just no good at dancing.
The growth mindset says, anyone can be good at anything. Skill comes only from practice. Two impossibly hard tests were given to hundreds of children. After the first test, all the students were praised, but half of the students were privately told these six words, you must be good at this.
The other half are privately told these six words, you must have worked really hard. When they were given the second test, the students who were told you must be good at this did 20% worse on the second test. Those six words encouraged a fixed mindset that made them feel there was no point in trying. You either are or you aren't.
The students who were told you must have worked really hard did 30% better on the second test. Those six words encouraged a growth mindset that made them feel that working harder made all the difference. So that's a plus or minus 50% difference in performance because of six quick words by one teacher. Multiply that by all the people in your life, all the days you hear feedback and all the things you tell yourself.
And you can see how this simple difference in mindset can make or break a life of learning. Parents pay attention to this. You may be harming your kids when you tell them they're good at things. Successful people pay attention to this.
You may be harming yourself if you believe the praise that people give you. People tell you you're great at what you do. Remember just that you must have worked hard. So life is learning.
What do you think? Something else? Should we look at the Buddhist idea that life is suffering? That's no fun.
Life is love? Too ambiguous. Life is nothing but replicating DNA? Too accurate.
Let's change the subject. To be continued. You just listened to part 2 of the post titled The Meaning of Life by Derek Sivers of Sivers.org. This episode is brought to you by TELUS Online Security.
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